Arundhati Roy opens Amnesty International Hollywood Film Festival
May 27 - June 1

Amnesty International opens its Los Angeles Film Festival on Tuesday at UCLA's Royce Hall with a showing of Dam/Age. Arundhati Roy will be speaking in person at the showing.

Dam/age traces writer Arundhati Roy's bold and controversial campaign against the Narmada dam project in India, which led to her conviction for criminal contempt by India's Supreme Court. As the film traces the events that led up to her imprisonment, Roy meditates on her own personal negotiation with her fame, the responsibility it places on her as a writer, a political thinker and a citizen, and the choices she has made.

For tickets to this free event (starts at 7:00 p.m.) call 310 825-2101.

The Film Festival runs through the following weekend at various locations - with a powerful list of documentaries - including Death on a Friendly Border (the tremendous toll taken by Operation Gatekeeper on the US/Mexico border), Hidden In Plain Sight (on the School of the America's and the powerful annual demonstrations that bring tens of thousands each year to and in civil disobedience, through the gates of Ft. Benning), Afghan Massacre (a film that documents the murder of thousands of Afghan POW's - whose death by suffocation and heat in shipping containers too place under U.S. watch), and The Murder of Emmett Till (a 14 year old Black youth whose murder by racists stood as a rallying cry for the Civil Rights movement).

For full information on the Film Festival go to: http://www.amnestyusa.org/filmfest/weho/2003/

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